CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN
COGNITION & NEUROSCIENCES/ConnexConnex

This seminar will be held online on MS Teams. Link for the seminar: https://bit.ly/3FVJkC3

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Human decision making is accompanied by a sense of confidence in the accuracy of a decision. Previous work has unraveled how the process of evidence accumulation can account for a wide range of expressions of decision confidence. Notably, the sense of confidence has been successfully modelled as reflecting the probability of a choice being correct given the accumulated evidence. In the current talk, I will providence neural and computational evidence showing that the brain computes decision confidence by flexibly mapping accumulated evidence onto decision confidence. This flexible mapping allows to account for pervasive cases of under- and overconfidence. Next, I will discuss data showing that this computed level of decision confidence is used to optimally adapt cognition, for example by requesting more information when appropriate and only engaging in tasks associated with high confidence. These findings provide further insight, and point towards potential remedies, about maladaptive use of confidence in clinical groups, in financial and medical decision making scenarios, and societal dilemmas.